Precarious employment and gender inequality

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'Precarious' employment is a major issue in Spain, which has the highest levels of temporary employment in Europe, at around a third of all employment in 2001. While both men and women are affected by temporary employment, it is women who experience it most. This feature reviews recent research into the issue of precarious employment and gender in Spain, and presents the latest statistical evidence on the relationship between temporary employment, gender and age.

'Precarious employment', and notably temporary employment, is one of the negative characteristics of the Spanish labour market that differentiate it from other European countries. Since the labour reform of 1984, temporary recruitment has become a structural feature of employment that bears little relation to the seasonal work and labour market integration policies for which this type of recruitment was initially intended. A subsequent 1994 reform aimed at limiting temporary recruitment failed to meet this objective. At the end of 2000, over 30% of wage-earners were on temporary contracts. Though this phenomenon affects both sexes, a greater proportion of women than men are on temporary contracts. Below, we review some of the research findings and latest statistics relating to precarious employment in Spain.

The concept of 'precarious employment'

In the strict sense, 'precarious' employment and the process of 'increasingly precarious employment' has been identified with 'the increasing importance of temporary employment within paid employment as a whole' (see 'Empleo y paro en España: 1976-1990', F Fernández, L Garrido and L Toharia, in Las relaciones laborales en España, F Migueléz and C Prieto (eds), Madrid, SXXI ed, 1991). Precarious employment is therefore related to the types of employment contract offered rather than the characteristics of the job.

Two dimensions of 'precarious employment' can be distinguished: the contractual relationship and the social repercussions. An unstable employment contractual relationship tends to consist of some type of temporary contract. However, other factors may make workers' jobs more unstable, such as the capacity for individual or collective bargaining or the level of income. The social repercussions of precarious employment can be very great. In a society in which work and employment are a basic mechanism for distributing income and achieving economic autonomy and a social position, precarious employment places those who suffer it in a position of dependence, with little access to the basic resources of society - leading to a situation of social exclusion.

However, this approach to precarious employment is seen by some as deriving from a 'masculine' vision of employment that identifies employment as the 'stable, full-time job' of the male adult. Account should therefore be taken of two issues: age and gender.

In considering the relation between precarious employment and age, one can identify certain situations of precarious employment that could be called transitory and are associated with unskilled temporary jobs with low pay, as in the case of students who combine work with study. In this case, the employment is precarious but is very different to that which can be observed among the (post-student) adult population. In both cases the jobs are precarious, but the social repercussions are very different.

Considering precarious employment from the viewpoint of gender inequality, it can be seen in the light of the concept of a 'stable, full-time job' that characterised male employment in developed societies from the end of the Second World War to the late 1970s. A stable male job is regarded as the pillar that helps to sustain the figure of the 'breadwinner' as a practice and symbol of the sexual division of labour. From this viewpoint, it can be argued that precarious employment and social inclusion/exclusion are not unrelated to gender relations. Thus, according to some researchers (see 'Paro y tolerancia social de la exclusión: el caso de España', T Torns in Las nuevas fronteras de la desigualdad. Hombres y mujeres en el mercado de trabajo, M Maruani, Ch Rogerat and T Torns (eds) , Barcelona, Icària, 2000) the greater social tolerance towards phenomena such as female unemployment or atypical forms of employment for women can be explained by attributes linked to domesticity, the greater role of women in the private sphere and the social legitimacy of a certain type of 'delegated citizenship' for women.

As a result, it is claimed that a 'female wage relationship' (see Maruani, Rogerat and Torns, 2000 [cited above], and Femmes et salariat : l'inegalité dans l'indifférence, Ph Alonzo, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2000) is thus established through: greater exposure to atypical forms of employment, such as temporary and part-time work (ES0106245F); vertical and horizontal labour market segregation and lower pay (ES0105242F); and, indeed, the greater participation of women in any of the more flexible forms of employment or in 'non-employment', ie unemployment or inactivity (see 'Las asalariadas: un mercado con género', T Torns, in Miguélez and Prieto (eds), 1999 [cited above]). This occurs for all age groups and in close relation to possible domestic responsibilities in the present and in the future (see 'Jóvenes, empleo y desigualdades de género', P Carrasquer, Cuadernos de Relaciones Laborales, nº 11, 1997, and 'El empleo de las jóvenes', T Torns and P Carrasquer, in Juventudes, mercados de trabajo y políticas de empleo, L Cachón (ed), Valencia, 7 i mig Ed, 1999). In other words, women have the role that has traditionally been attributed to them by society.

Due to the characteristics of what has been defined as the 'female' model of employment, it would seem reasonable to extend the concept of 'precarious employment' to include not only employment carried out under any type of temporary contract, but also all 'non-standard' forms of employment that differ from the 'stable, full-time job'. However, here our attention will focus on one of the most widespread practices: temporary jobs.

Temporary recruitment in Spain: between age and gender?

As noted above, in the early 1990s, Fernández, Garrido and Toharia (1991 [cited above]) stated that the phenomenon of precarious employment had connotations of age and sex/gender. In the late 1990s, this view was reiterated by Garrido, Toharia and García-Serrano (see 'Empleo y paro en España: algunas cuestiones candentes', C García-Serrano, L Garrido and L Toharia, in Miguélez and Prieto (eds), 1999 [cited above]), in a work that continued where the earlier work left off. Other researchers (see 'La nueva regulación del mercado de trabajo en España', A Bilbao, in La crisis del empleo en Europa, C Prieto (ed), Alzira (Valencia), Germanía, vol 1, 1999) consider that the effect of age or 'generation' predominates over that of gender. Finally, yet other specialists consider that in addition to age and other variables that may have an influence, precarious female employment must be approached as one more characteristic of the 'female wage relationship' (see La segmentación del mercado laboral en España, A Recio, in Miguélez and Prieto (eds), 1999 [cited above], and T Torns, 1999 [cited above]).

The appendix at the end of this article contains tables providing statistical data on temporary employment by sex, age, sector and type, in 1994 and 2000.

The impact of age on temporary employment is clear. For the age cohorts joining the labour market after the mid-1980s, temporary recruitment was a common means of access to employment. This is an underlying factor in examining the living conditions of the young and their transition to adult life from the viewpoint of the 'centrality of work' and the value of work for the young of both sexes (see Carrasquer, 1997 [cited above] and Cachón, 1999 [cited above]). Today, temporary employment is not an exclusive feature of the young, but forms part of the working reality of the adult population (see table 3 in the appendix below).

Beyond the homogenising effect of the time at which workers joins the labour market (eg a generally high rate of temporary employment for all those entering the labour since the 1980s), the gender dimension maintains its value in explaining levels of temporary employment, both: in quantitative terms - the higher rate of temporary recruitment among female wage-earners, see tables 1 and 2 below; and in qualitative terms - the higher rate of female temporary employment in sectors with relatively stable employment (see table 4) and the greater extent of 'indeterminate' situations of temporary recruitment, such as verbal contracts, in female employment (see table 5).

In the fourth quarter of 2000, temporary contracts affected 31.6% of all wage earners. For male wage earners the figure was 30.3%, whereas for female wage earners it was 33.7%. In other words, one out of three female wage earners in Spain works under one of the various types of temporary contract (see table 1).

Overall, since late 1994 the overall increase in temporary recruitment has led to an increase in the proportion of women affected by it. In 1994, female temporary recruitment made up 38.2% of total temporary employment, whereas the figure was 41.5% at the end of 2000 (see table 2).

One of the features that tends to be stressed in female employment is women's presence in the public sector, which tends to be considered as a factor of stability in employment. However, employment in the public sector is not always a synonym of stability for women in the same way as it is for men. Overall, the level of temporary recruitment is considerably lower in the public sector than in the private sector (20.3% and 34.6% respectively, for the fourth quarter of 2000 - see table 1). However, even in this sector female wage earners are more exposed to temporary employment than male wage earners. Thus, women accounted for 51.1% of temporary recruitment in the public sector in the last quarter of 1994, but 57% in the same quarter of 2000, in a context of growth in this type of contract in this sector (see table 2). In other words: in 1994, one in every five women employed in the Spanish public sector had a temporary contract, while in 2000 the figure was almost one in four.

Temporary contracts are not distributed homogeneously between the different sectors of activity (see table 4). Seasonal work (as in agriculture or catering, for example) favours temporary employment, although temporary contracts of this type only represent 7%-8% of the total (see table 5). Except in the case of construction, the level of temporary recruitment among female wage earners is always higher than the proportion of women in employment (see table 4). Even in sectors with a majority of female employees and that are more stable in employment terms than others, such as education and health, the proportion of temporary employment is greater among female wage earners.

Commentary

To summarise, temporary recruitment affects almost a third of all wage earners: in other words, it is a distinctive structural feature of the Spanish labour market. The impact of temporary employment is distributed unequally between men and women in favour of the former in both the public and the private sector. However, in Spain the distance between the two sexes in relation to temporary employment is lower than that observed for other 'atypical' forms of employment, such as part-time work, and far lower than that observed for forms of 'non-employment' such as unemployment and inactivity. (Pilar Carrasquer, QUIT-UAB)

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